Category Archives: FOIA

The Washington Post: Amazon story lands big for small paper

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Erik Wemple: "There’s a good lesson for newspapers in [Pennsylvania newspaper the Morning Call's] detailed and compelling investigation [into conditions at Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley warehouse facilities]: If there’s a name brand employing lots of people in your coverage area — Amazon certainly qualifies — take a look at how it treats its employees."

FT.com: Gove faces probe over private e-mails

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"As part of its inquiry, the FT saw or obtained from third parties e-mails discussing government business circulated through private accounts. It then sought disclosure of all or part of seven of them using targeted FOIA requests. The requests explicitly asked for checks on named private accounts. In each case, the department said the information was not held."

Telegraph: Government ‘will take 35 years to recoup tuition fee losses’

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"Official estimates suggest the amount of money loaned to students will balloon to a record level by 2047 before the Treasury starts to recoup the losses from graduates. ... Estimates obtained after a Freedom of Information request show that the size of the loans bill will grow for 35 years. This is based on the Government paying out an average fee loan of just over £7,500. "

Belfast Telegraph: FCO red-faced over briefing blunder

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"The embarrassing blunder comes just two months after the Ministry of Defence was forced into an emergency retraction of secret information about Britain's nuclear-powered submarines it posted online. Both official documents contained sensitive material that appeared to be blacked out but could in fact be read by anyone using a computer to copy and paste it into another file."

ProPublica: A Reader’s Guide to the (Still Coming) Sarah Palin Emails

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"Alaska’s decision to provide only paper copies has been puzzling. While nothing in the state’s public records law requires the state to provide records in electronic form, public agencies are “encouraged” to “make information available in usable electronic formats to the greatest extent feasible.” Though government agencies have fumbled on redactions in the past, software certainly exists to safely redact electronic data. ...
Various news agencies have joined the scramble to sift through the documents and restore them to an electronic format."

Sunlight Labs: The Palin Emails and Redaction Technology

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"Today's release of the Palin emails is prompting frustration among reporters, environmentalists and people who know how to use computers over the fact that the documents are being delivered in the form of a huge, $700+ stack of paper. ... this decision is being attributed to the difficulty of performing redaction properly within an all-digital system. ... Redaction mistakes do happen -- the brilliant Tim Lee recently released some interesting work showing how to quantify just how often -- but doing it properly isn't rocket science."

Telegraph: Councils spend £100m on taxpayer-funded credit cards

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"This newspaper has obtained details of credit card spending at 186 councils across Britain using Freedom of Information laws. Over the past three years, documents show these councils have spent more than £40 million using the taxpayer-funded cards, which suggests total council spending of about £100 million at all local authorities."

WSJ.com: WSJ Jet Tracker

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"The Wall Street Journal filed several Freedom of Information Act requests with the Federal Aviation Administration for the entire Enhanced Traffic Management System database, which contains flight records for aircraft that flew in the U.S. under instrument flight rules. The Journal analyzed the flight data for non-commercial jet aircraft traffic for a four-year period, 2007 through 2010. ... The Journal has included in the flights database an estimated cost to operate each flight. The estimates are based on per-hour cost figures for each model of jet, provided by Conklin & de Decker Aviation Information, an industry consulting firm used by some public companies to provide aircraft-cost estimates for regulatory filings."